Learning how different animals sleep could help scientists figure out the purpose of this important but poorly understood function.
identifying it in octopuses. Cephalopods like these evolved eons before the rise of creatures that would have shared a lineage with both birds and humans. “There’s no way there’s a common ancestor there,” says Frank. Now scientists are wondering if this sleep state is more common than they initially realized, or if it developed in different species at different times, the way wings and flight arose separately in insects, bats, and birds, a phenomenon called convergent evolution.
For mammals, scientists might implant electrodes in their brains to track how their neurons are firing. But octopuses have a highly distributed central nervous system. Instead of concentrating control of their nervous system in one brain, they have eight ganglia in their arms that often act independently.
For example, the team’s paper describes a brief state called “quiet half and half,” when the octopuses exhibited a striking pattern in which one half of the animal is completely white, and the other completely black. This pattern normally appears during courtship or turf fights. Since it was obvious that the sleeping animals weren’t engaging in those activities, the researchers wondered if they were dreaming about these scenarios and broadcasting the dreams on their skin.
Recording this behavior is the first step to understanding it, but Iglesias warns that these descriptions are not the same as knowing what the animal is perceiving. Once you get beyond the quantitative observations, she says, “then comes the harder part of asking questions. What are they thinking? What are they feeling? What are they experiencing? That’s a big leap.”
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